Sunday, October 15, 2017

October 15th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

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Mata Hari executed 1917

Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is
executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of
Paris.

She first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of
exotic Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe,
telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and
taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari,
meaning “eye of the day” in Malay. In reality, Mata Hari was born in a
small town in northern Holland in 1876, and her real name was Margaretha
Geertruida Zelle. She acquired her superficial knowledge of Indian and
Javanese dances when she lived for several years in Malaysia with her
former husband, who was a Scot in the Dutch colonial army. Regardless of
her authenticity, she packed dance halls and opera houses from Russia
to France, mostly because her show consisted of her slowly stripping
nude.

She became a famous courtesan, and with the outbreak of World War I
her catalog of lovers began to include high-ranking military officers of
various nationalities. In February 1917, French authorities arrested
her for espionage and imprisoned her at St. Lazare Prison in Paris. In a
military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details
of the Allies’ new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of
thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on
October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing
squad at Vincennes.

There is some evidence that Mata Hari acted as a German spy, and for a
time as a double agent for the French, but the Germans had written her
off as an ineffective agent whose pillow talk had produced little
intelligence of value. Her military trial was riddled with bias and
circumstantial evidence, and it is probable that French authorities
trumped her up as “the greatest woman spy of the century” as a
distraction for the huge losses the French army was suffering on the
western front. Her only real crimes may have been an elaborate stage
fallacy and a weakness for men in uniform.

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